Istanbul's history dates back to 633 B.C. when
Doric settlers from Megara founded a small,
commercial colony here that became known as
Byzantion. Two major constraints dictated the siting
of ancient cities: topography and strategic
considerations. The site of this new town was
located at the tip of a peninsula that commanded
three waterways. With the formal establishment of
the polis, a city wall measuring five kilometers in
length and having twenty-seven towers was built as
protection. Within the walls, a hill within the walls
was selected as its acropolis. This was the first of
the city's eventual seven hills - apparently a
topographical "must" for legendary ancient cities.

Continuous expansion and growth resulted in
several transformations of the city's appearance. The
first major one took place in 196, during the reign of
the Roman emperor Septimus Severus. This involved
the rebuilding of the land wall. Another Roman
emperor, Constantine the Great, transformed the city
into a great metropolis that he renamed
Constantinopolis. This city was to become the
capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
In 412 with the aim of creating a new metropolis
to serve as the capital of his empire,
Emperor Theodosius undertook the fourth major
expansion of the city and rebuilt the landwalls.

In the course of the centuries, palaces were built,
abandoned, demolished, and rebuilt. Most of these
overlooked the Sea of Marmara. Thus the Emperor
Justinian (565-578) was making a radical and - for
the city - fateful change when he decided to locate
his new palace (Blachernae) at a place where the
seawalls of the Golden Horn met the landwalls cutting
across the peninsula. By the time of Alexius
Comnenus (1061-1118), Blachernae was officially
designated the imperial residence and all the other
Byzantine palaces were abandoned.

Two thousand one hundred forty years after the
foundation of the city, a young Ottoman sultan
conquered the city at the age of twenty-three.
Mehmed the II, given the name Fatih
"Conqueror" in honor of his victory, made his
conquest the capital of his vigorous, expanding
empire. With his ambitions for world domination, he
chose as the site of his administrative center and
residence the very same place on which the original
city was founded: a coincidence, perhaps, but more
likely a reaffirmation of the rules of locational
determinism; for even the length of the surrounding
walls and the area they contained were close to
those of ancient Byzantion.

At the time of his conquest, Sultan Mehmed
encountered an impoverished city with a population
of a mere forty thousand souls who lived scattered
about in isolated residential sections set amidst
cultivated fields. The site he chose for his palace was
typical: a hill covered with an olive grove,
presumably several abandoned monastic structures,
chapels, and bathhouses, and a small residential
district by the sea.

This was the beginning of an unprecedented
scheme of grandiose proportions which became
synonymous with Ottoman cultural and administrative
history. More than a residential
complex for the royal household, the new palace
was to become the pivotal institution for the planning
and decision-making institutions of a far-flung empire
and it remained so from the late 15th century to the
middle of the l9th.

With its "irregular, asymmetric, non-axial, and
un-monumental proportions" as some European
travelers described it, Topkapi Palace was certainly
quite different from the European palaces with which
they were familiar whether in terms of appearance or
of layout. But it was also fundamentally different from
oriental or Islamic palaces even though they might
have had similar patterns of spatial organization. In
fact, Topkapi was a sui generis microcosm, a
paradise on earth or "to borrow a term from
Ottoman palace terminology" The Palace of
Felicity.

Topkapi may be considered a trans-cultural focal
point in which a holistic civilization was created from
the nomadic culture of Turkish tribesmen whose
forefathers had set out from Central Asia and
reached Asia Minor with stopovers in Persia and
Mesopotamia. Within the historically short period of
two centuries, the Ottomans rose from a small,
feudal principality to become a major -the major-
world power, yet at the same time they possessed a
court tradition and culture of their own that was over
a thousand years old. Undoubtedly Topkapi involved
a synthesis of Byzantine elements but what grew up
on the peninsula by the Golden Horn cannot possibly
be divorced from its predecessors in Ottoman
history.

With their conquest of Bursa in 1326, the
Ottomans developed a new (for them) concept of a
palace situated within a citadel in their new capital.
Although no definite historical information is available
about this palace's formal and functional
organization, it may be assumed that it was here that
the social organization and components of future
palaces were shaped.

During the period of the empire's early formation
and expansion (particularly during the conquest of
the European territories called Rumeli) the concept
of an established administrative capital had - for
geopolitical reasons - to be flexible. Following his
capture of Dimetoka in 1362, Murad I ordered the
construction of a palace there and until 1368, that
city served as the empire's temporary capital. The
early sultans perforce developed the concept of
keeping the center of administrative power moving
as dictated by the mobility of military power.

Although Edirne was also conquered in 1362, and
became the center of the administration of the
empire's Rumelian territories, it did not become the
formal capital until 1368, following
the completion of a new palace built there. At the
same time, Bursa remained a capital in its own right.
Thus we see that the earlier empire was one in which
there was a plurality of
administrative focal points.

The first palace to be built in Edirne (which later
became known as Eski Saray "Old Palace") was
located in a place called Kavak Meydanl, the spot
where Selimiye mosque was to be built in the 16th
century. During the brief reign of Celebi Musa
(1411), the palace grounds, in the form of a square,
were protected by a wall fifteen meters high which
turned it into an urban citadel. We have almost no
detailed information about this palace's formal or
functional organization or its architectural features.

Since it was originally the custom in the Ottoman
empire for princes of the line to serve as provincial
governors in cities like Kutahya, Amasya, and
Manisa, palaces -whether new
ones or reconstructions of existing ones- were built
in such places for them to reside in.

Back in Edirne, work on the construction of a new
palace began in 1447 on the banks of the Tunca
river. It was not completed until 1457, by which time
Mehmed II had already occupied the throne for six
years and Istanbul for four.

After the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, a new
palace for the Ottoman house was built within the
walls of the city at a place called Forum Tauri. It
replaced an abandoned monastery there. Also
referred to in old Ottoman sources as Eski Saray,
this palace covered a rather large area. Sultan
Mehmed did not, however, live there much,
preferring to take up residence in Edirne between
campaigns.

When Istanbul was declared the empire's formal
capital however, Eski Saray acquired the status of
the sovereign's residence. Mehmed lived there until
about the middle of the 1470's, by which time he had
realized that he needed to construct a new palace
whose grandeur and magnificence were more in
accord with his imperial ambitions as evinced in the
title "Ruler of the Two Seas and the Two Continents"
that he assumed.

Within the remarkably short span of only ten
years, four palaces were built in succession. It was
probably this more than anything else that firmly
established the roots of the extraordinary
spatio-social evolutionary process that was to
become the Ottoman palace tradition. The
developmental stages of these palaces clearly define
the royal house's developing conceptualization of
what a palace should be: seat of government and
imperial residence. The elements of this duality
mutually influenced and transformed each other
affecting the spatial
and functional components of the Ottoman
palaces until the early 18th century. The stages
in this development may be summarized as:

Edirne Yeni Sarayi whose modifications and
successive extensions undertaken in different
stages and periods led to the evolution of
residential and administrative units often with
the same private and ceremonial functions and
even with the same names. Thus this palace
exhibits important parallels with the new palace
in Istanbul.

Istanbul Eski Sarayi which, though originally
intended as the Ottoman residence, was to play
a vital role, as the "Women's Palace" in the
development and spatial transformation of what
was to become the new palace's Harem. While
this palace served initially as the residence of
the sultan's immediate family (mother, wives,
and children), it later became the residence of
all the womenfolk of deceased sovereigns. It
thus serves as a parallel and external model for
the official Harem of the new palace.

In his capacity as chief planner of his capital,
Mehmed II set out the structure of the state
with its own organizational philosophy, inter-
related institutions, and ceremonial orders
(including the ethics, manners, and rituals that
ultimately became traditions) as well as the
physical environment of the capital in which all
its integrated institutions were located in
designated zones and districts.

Mehmed II's Kanunname (literally "Book of
Laws") lays down what are essentially the
schematics for his prospective global empire-
the "Third Rome". But although all its
institutions are described in detail and were to
be located somewhere within the urban context,
the sultan's intentions with regard to matters
of location and organization are not clearly
known; only some vague assumptions can be
made on the basis of the known duality of
function.

Although he originally selected as the site of
his palace a location that was thoroughly urban,
he later chose to relocate it to another that was
(at the time) relatively remote and isolated. His
motives in this cannot be precisely discerned.
Did he anticipate the separate (or integrated)
primary function of the new palace as a private
domain or residence or as a ceremonial domain
that would be fitted out with the administrative
functions of the state?

Another related, and unresolved, problem
was why Yedikule, which was designed and built
in accordance with the most sophisticated
concepts of military architecture of the day, was
to function solely as an imperial treasury. What
purpose did he originally envision this structure
serving? Compared with this, his intentions
and aims in the construction of his kulliye
(multi-functional complex) in the modern-day
district of Fatih are clear and well formulated:
it was here that the class of civil servants who
would serve the state and make scholarly and
technological contributions to its progress were
to be educated.

All the palaces built (or completed) during
the reign of Mehmed II exhibit the same spatial
order based on the principle of interconnected
courtyards, each located in clearly defined public,
semi-public, and private zones. These courtyards
were arranged according to hierarchical
considerations with their shapes being determined
by topography rather than precise
geometric or orthogonal principles. The
number of these courtyards was flexible: there
had to be at least two but could be as many as
nine, as in the case of the Edirne place. Only
five of them, however, were given the designation
meydan (square) or taslik (courtyard) according
to the particular palace's terminology.

Palaces evolving around courtyards in the
course of their historical development existed
in both oriental and occidental cultures long
before the Ottoman experiment. Spatial
organization principles considering courtyards
as "unit spaces" constituted a common design
vocabulary that quite often was implemented
as both an integrating and segregating spatial
constraint.

The use of walls and courtyards and of clear
and strong transitions between and among
them is one way of expressing domains. The
spatial system of a palace (or of any other
structure for that matter) is an expression of
a human behavioral system. In this context,
unwanted behavior and interaction that can be
prevented (or controlled) through rules (manners,
hierarchies, avoidance) can be reinforced
through architecture that creates areas (zones)
that are arranged hierarchically and occupied
by various groups creating a balance of power
among them, which in turn makes it possible
to create the "system" through which group
identities are formed, maintained, and
integrated.

It is for this reason that all the legendary
palaces that are formed around a system of
courtyards -Beijing or Forbidden City, Delhi,
Akra, Fatehpur Sirki, and Alhambra- exhibit
striking spatial/organizational similarities.
Since an absolute ruler's philosophical vision
of what should be the administrative and
residential constituents evolved around a
common behavioral system and tradition, they
naturally reflect similar sources and guiding
principles.

Today Topkapi Palace functions as a museum
and only a very small part of its original domain
and environment can be appreciated. The
ravages of time have resulted in the destruction
(by fire) and the demolition (through new
building) of many of its original structures.
Despite this, the original 15th century spatial
organization based on a triple courtyard order
that integrates, segregates, and defines the
palace's residential, ceremonial, and functional
requirements has remained remarkably intact.

These individual requirements led to the
formation of homogeneous, self-contained
clusters that evolved around smaller courtyards
since this was dictated by the formative systems
of the social and functional groups, corps,
classes, and institutions that occupied them.
These clusters are not isolated, however, but are
linked to and aligned with the main courtyards
creating a self- contained microcosm that perfectly mirrors
the state it housed.

That then defines the methodology of this
book. By analytically exhibiting the spatial
hierarchy of the palace, reconsidering its order
and the successive stages of its transformation,
we shall endeavor to expose the present state
and past of this unique world, the Palace of
Felicity.